The former deputy prime minister helped negotiate the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and was in Copenhagen acting as an informal bridge between the Chinese delegation and others.

As a frequent visitor to China, who knows many of its officials personally, Prescott fears privately that the Chinese will walk away from the talks if they continue to be singled out for blame.

In a letter to the Guardian, Prescott criticises the US climate change special envoy, Todd Stern, who "said at Copenhagen emissions weren't about 'morality or politics', they were 'just maths', with China projected to emit 60% more CO2 than the US by 2030".

In his letter Prescott claims that Stern's arguments "ignored the more transparent measure of pollution per capita, which shows the US emits 20 tonnes per person every year, compared to China's six tonnes, whilst America's GDP per person is almost eight times greater than the Chinese". He also attacks President Barack Obama for suggesting there had been a period of "two decades of talking and no action. That might have been true in America, which refused to sign up to Kyoto, but not in the case of China or Europe, who followed a lot of that protocol's policies. Indeed Obama's offer of a 17% cut is wholly dependent on Congressional approval and will still be less than Kyoto targets." Prescott is climate change convenor for the Council of Europe, with the role of exploring how to keep the talks on the road.

China itself defended its "crucial role" in saving the Copenhagen conference from failure, according to the state media's first blow-by-blow rebuttal of European claims that China wrecked a climate deal.

In a florid account of prime minister Wen Jiabao's 60 hours in Copenhagen, the Xinhua news agency said the premier staved off the "unrealistic and unfair demands" of Britain, Germany and Japan.

There is no direct criticism of the US, but Obama is described as "awkward" in the presence of the Chinese premier.

According to the lengthy defence of China's actions, European nations repeatedly tried to impose secret drafts, unscheduled meetings and a hidden agenda on China and other developing nations.

The article, likely to have been approved at the highest level of government, notes that Wen walked out of a state dinner after hearing that an unscheduled meeting of leaders was being arranged soon afterwards to discuss a new draft text.

"It was really absurd that the country who called for the meeting never informed China," the report says. "Premier Wen concluded that this was no small matter.

"Since the start of the conference, there had been cases where individual or small group of countries put forward new texts in disregard of the principle of openness and transparency, arousing strong complaints from other participants."

Such accusations infuriate senior European negotiators, who claim China was fully informed ahead of Copenhagen of the plan for a new document, though it never agreed to the content.

Xinhua avoids mention of how and why China killed attempts to impose 2050 targets for reducing emissions. Beijing has consistently rejected such long-term goals, which it sees as a threat to itseconomic growth.It also fails to address claims that China torpedoed the inclusion of a 1.5C maximum global temperature rise, requested by small island states and African nations. Instead, it says, Wen showed sincerity by accepting a rise of no more than 2C by 2050.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

JERUSALEM — Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report "anti-Semitic."

The academic, Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Sheppard-Hughes said that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

While insisting that all organ harvesting was done with permission, Israel's Health Ministry told Channel 2, "The guidelines at that time were not clear." It added, "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law."

Friday, December 4, 2009

IN the Mumbai kindergarten my son went to, the children never had to clean up after themselves; that was the servants’ job. So I really liked the school my son attended when we moved back to Brooklyn, where the teachers made the children tidy up at the end of the day. “Cleanup time, cleanup time!” my 6-year-old sang, joyfully gathering his scraps. It’s a wonderful American tradition: you always clean up the mess you made.

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.

An additional 15,000 people have since died from the aftereffects, and 10 to 30 people are said to die every month from exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic waste left over in the former factory. But amazingly, the site still has not been cleaned up, because Dow Chemical, which since acquired Union Carbide, refuses to accept any responsibility. The groundwater is contaminated; children of the survivors suffer from genetic abnormalities; and the victims have long since run out of their measly compensation and are begging on the streets.

I have traveled to Bhopal and seen the post-apocalyptic devastation, seen the sick, seen the factory. Methyl isocyanate is a deadly chemical used to kill insects. The night that 40 tons of it wafted out of the factory is, for the survivors, a fulcrum in time, marking the before and after in their lives. They still talk about “the gas” as if it were an organism they know well — how it killed buffalo and pigs, but spared chickens; how it traveled toward Jahangirabad and Hamidia Road, while ignoring other parts of the city; how it clung to the wet earth in some places but hovered at waist level in others; how it blackened all the leaves of a peepul tree; how they could watch it move down the other side of the road, like a rain cloud seen from a sunny spot.

All over India, when misfortune strikes — when a child is ill, for example — people burn chilies to drive away the evil eye. The gas smelled like chilies burning, and people said to one another, it must be a powerfully evil eye that’s being driven away, the stench is so strong.

Fleeing the gas, the Bhopalis clutched their children. Some babies fell, gasping, and their parents had to choose which ones to carry on their shoulders. One image still comes up over and over in their dreams: in the stampede, a thousand people are stepping on their child’s body.

In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disaster. If Union Carbide was at fault, that was too bad; it had just ceased to exist. In 2002, Dow set aside $2.2 billion to cover potential liabilities arising from Union Carbide’s American asbestos production. By comparison, the total settlement for Bhopal was $470 million. The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount “is plenty good for an Indian.” As Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey observed in 2006, “In Bhopal, some of the world’s poorest people are being mistreated by one of the world’s richest corporations.”

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

What’s missing in the whole sad story is any sense of a human connection between the faceless people who run the corporation and the victims. In 1995, a Bhopali woman named Sajida Bano sent a handwritten letter to Union Carbide. The factory had killed her husband in 1981 in an accident, and then, on the night of the disaster, her 4-year-old son. “You put your hand on your heart and think,” she wrote, “if you are a human being: if this happened to you, how would your wife and children feel?” She never received a response.

The survivors of Bhopal want only to be treated as human beings — not victims, not greedy money-grabbers, just human beings who’ve gone through hell and are entitled to a measure of dignity. That includes concrete things like cleaning up the mess and providing health care for the sick, and also something more abstract but equally important — an acknowledgment that a wrong was done to them, and an apology, which Bhopalis have yet to receive.

That was another fine thing my son learned in the Brooklyn school: when you’ve done something bad, you should say you’re sorry. After a quarter of a century, Dow should acknowledge that it is responsible for a very big mess. And now, it’s cleanup time.

Suketu Mehta, a journalism professor at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

Saturday, October 24, 2009

It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.

Freud famously asked: “What do women want?” Notice that he didn’t ask what men wanted—perhaps he thought that he’d figured that one out. But that’s a question that ad people, media execs, and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years. They’re particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: there are a lot more of them than before; and they tend to have some extra change. Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period.

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. Historically, marketers have found this group an “elusive audience”—the phrase is permanently affixed to “men between 18 and 34” in adspeak—largely immune to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products advertised there. But by the mid-1990s, as SYM ranks swelled, marketers began to get their number. One signal moment came in April 1997, when Maxim, a popular British “lad magazine,” hit American shores. Maxim strove to be the anti-Playboy-and-Esquire; bad-boy owner Felix Dennis sniffed at celebrity publishers with their tired formulas. Instead, he later observed, the magazine’s creators adopted the “astonishing methodology of asking our readers what they wanted . . . and then supplying it.”

And what did those readers—male, unmarried, median age 26, median household income $60,000 or so—want? As the philosophers would say, duh. Maxim plastered covers and features with pouty-lipped, tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that didn’t do the trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it worked. More than any men’s magazine before or since, Maxim grabbed that elusive 18- to 34-year-old single-college-educated-guy market, and soon boasted about 2.5 million readers—more than GQ, Esquire, and Men’s Journal combined.

Victoria’s Secret cover art doesn’t fully explain the SYM’s attraction to Maxim. After all, plenty of down-market venues had the sort of bodacious covers bound to trigger the young male’s reptilian brain. No, what set Maxim apart from other men’s mags was its voice. It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room—where put-downs are high-fived; gadgets are cool; rock stars, sports heroes, and cyborg battles are awesome; jobs and Joni Mitchell suck; and babes are simply hot—or not. “Are there any cool jobs related to beer?” a reader’s letter asks in a recent issue. Answer: brand manager, beer tester, and brewmaster.

Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn’t want to grow up. Whatever else you might say about Playboy or Esquire, they tried to project the image of a cultured and au courant fellow; as Hefner famously—and from today’s cultural vantage point, risibly—wrote in an early Playboy, his ideal reader enjoyed “inviting a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Hearing this, the Maxim dude would want to hurl. He’d like to forget that he ever went to school.

Maxim happily obliges. The editors try to keep readers’ minds from wandering with articles like “Confessions of a Strip Club Bouncer.” But they rely heavily on picture-laden features promoting the latest skateboards, video games, camcorders, and other tech products, along with an occasional Q-and-A with, say, Kid Rock—all with the bare minimum of print required to distinguish a magazine from a shopping catalog or pinup calendar. Playboy’s philosophy may not have been Aristotle, but it was an attempt, of sorts, to define the good life. The Maxim reader prefers lists, which make up in brevity what they lose in thought: “Ten Greatest Video Game Heroes of All Time,” “The Five Unsexiest Women Alive,” “Sixteen People Who Look Like They Absolutely Reek,” and so on.

Still, Maxim is far from dumb, as its self-mockery proves. The Maxim child-man prides himself on his lack of pretense, his unapologetic guyness. The magazine’s subtext seems to be: “We’re just a bunch of horny, insensitive guys—so what?” What else to make of an article entitled “How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat’s Death Was an Accident”? “The only thing worse than a show about doctors is a show about sappy chick doctors we’re forced to watch or else our girlfriends won’t have sex with us,” the editors grumble about the popular (with women) Grey’s Anatomy.

The Maxim child-man voice has gone mainstream, which may explain why the magazine’s sales were flat enough for Dennis to sell it last summer. You’re that 26-year-old who wants sophomoric fun and macho action? Now the culture has a groaning table of entertainment with your name on it. Start with the many movies available in every guy-friendly genre: sci-fi flicks like Transformers, action and crime movies like American Gangster, comedies like Superbad, and the seemingly endless line of films starring Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, and the “Frat Pack,” as USA Today dubbed the group of young male comedians that includes Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen and Luke Wilson, Jack Black, and Steve Carell.

With a talent for crude physical comedy, gleeful juvenility, and self-humiliation, the Frat Packers are the child-man counterparts to the more conventional leads, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, whom women and Esquire editors love. In Old School (2003), three guys in their thirties decide to start a college fraternity. Frank the Tank (the moniker refers to his capacity for alcohol), played by Ferrell, flashes his saggy white derriere streaking through the college town; the scene is a child-man classic. In 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Carell plays a middle-aged nerd with a large action-figure collection but no action. In one guy-favorite scene, a beautician painfully waxes Carell’s hirsute chest; as Carell pointed out later, this was a “guy thing, this sadistic nature that men have to see other men in non-life-threatening pain.”

Even though the networks must be more restrained, television also has plenty of “stupid fun” (as Maxim calls a regular feature), gross-out humor, and even low-level sadism for child-man viewers. This state of affairs is newer than you might think. Apart from sports programming and The Simpsons, which came along in the early 1990s, there wasn’t a lot to make young men pick up the remote. Most prime-time television appealed to women and families, whose sensibilities were as alien to dudes as finger bowls.

Today, the child-man can find entire networks devoted to his interests: Spike TV runs wrestling matches, Star Trek reruns, and the high-tech detective drama CSI; Blackbelt TV broadcasts martial arts around the clock; sci-fi is everywhere. Several years ago, the Cartoon Network spied the potential in the child-man market, too, and introduced Adult Swim, late-night programming with “adult” cartoons like Family Guy and Futurama, a cult favorite co-created by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame. Adult Swim has cut into the male Letterman and Leno audience, luring gold-plated advertisers Saab, Apple, and Taco Bell; child-men, it should come as no surprise, eat lots of fast food.

One can also lay the success of cable giant Comedy Central at the child-man’s sneakered foot. In its early-nineties infancy, Comedy Central had old movie comedies, some stand-up acts, and few viewers. The next several years brought some buzz with shows like Politically Incorrect. But it was in 1997—the same year that Maxim arrived in America—that the network struck gold with a cartoon series starring a group of foul-mouthed eight-year-old boys. With its cutting subversion of all that’s sacred and polite, South Park was like a dog whistle that only SYMs could hear; the show became the highest-rated cable series in that age group.

In 1999, the network followed up with The Man Show, famous for its “Juggies” (half-naked women with exceptionally large, well, juggies), interviews with porn stars, drinking songs, and a jingle that advised, “Quit your job and light a fart / Yank your favorite private part.” It was “like Maxim for TV,” one network executive told Media Life. Comedy Central’s viewers, almost two-thirds of them male, have made both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report cultural touchstones and launched the careers of stars like Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Dave Chapelle, and, most notably, Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart—who has already hosted the Academy Awards and is set to do so again, a perfect symbol of the mainstreaming of the SYM sensibility.

Nothing attests more to the SYM’s growing economic and cultural might than video games do. Once upon a time, video games were for little boys and girls—well, mostly little boys—who loved their Nintendos so much, the lament went, that they no longer played ball outside. Those boys have grown up to become child-man gamers, turning a niche industry into a $12 billion powerhouse. Men between the ages of 18 and 34 are now the biggest gamers; according to Nielsen Media, almost half—48.2 percent—of American males in that age bracket had used a console during the last quarter of 2006, and did so, on average, two hours and 43 minutes per day. (That’s 13 minutes longer than 12- to 17-year-olds, who evidently have more responsibilities than today’s twentysomethings.) Gaming—online games, as well as news and information about games—often registers as the top category in monthly surveys of Internet usage.

And the child-man’s home sweet media home is the Internet, where no meddling censors or nervous advertisers deflect his desires. Some sites, like MensNewsDaily.com, are edgy news providers. Others, like AskMen.com, which claims 5 million visitors a month, post articles like “How to Score a Green Chick” in the best spirit of Maxim-style self-parody. “How is an SUV-driving, to-go-cup-using, walking environmental catastrophe like yourself supposed to hook up with them?” the article asks. Answer: Go to environmental meetings, yoga, or progressive bookstores (“but watch out for lesbians”).

Other sites, like MenAreBetterThanWomen.com, TuckerMax.com, TheBestPageInTheUniverse.com, and DrunkasaurusRex.com, walk Maxim’s goofiness and good-natured woman-teasing over the line into nastiness. The men hanging out on these sites take pride in being “badasses” and view the other half bitterly. A misogynist is a “man who hates women as much as women hate each other,” writes one poster at MenAreBetterThanWomen. Another rails about “classic woman ‘trap’ questions— Does this make me look fat? Which one of my friends would you sleep with if you had to? Do you really enjoy strip clubs?” The Fifth Amendment was created because its architects’ wives “drove them ape-shit asking questions that they’d be better off simply refusing to answer.”

That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of child-men and their frat/fart jokes; about 20 percent of Maxim readers are female, for instance, and presumably not all are doing research for the dating scene. But for many of the fairer sex, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In Internet chat rooms, in advice columns, at female water-cooler confabs, and in the pages of chick lit, the words “immature” and “men” seem united in perpetuity. Women complain about the “Peter Pan syndrome”—the phrase has been around since the early 1980s but it is resurgent—the “Mr. Not Readys,” and the “Mr. Maybes.” Sex and the City chronicled the frustrations of four thirtysomething women with immature, loutish, and uncommitted men for six popular seasons.

Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature come to be? The most prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles. The hyper-masculinity of Maxim et al. doesn’t reflect any genuine male proclivities; rather, retrograde media “construct” it.

The fact that guys cheer on female heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as they do Chuck Norris tells against this theory somewhat. But there’s an ounce of truth to it. The men of the new media are in backlash mode, largely because they believe that feminists have stood in their way as media gatekeepers—that is, agents, editors, producers, and the like—who don’t understand or accept “men acting like men.” They gleefully stick their thumbs in the eyes of politically correct tsk-tskers. In one South Park episode, the Sexual Harassment Panda, a mascot who teaches schoolkids the evils of sexual harassment, is fired after his little talks provoke a flood of inane lawsuits. In Maxim, readers can find articles like “How to Cure a Feminist,” one of whose recommendations is to “pretend you share her beliefs” by asking questions like, “Has Gloria Steinem’s marriage hurt the feminist agenda?”

Insofar as the new guy media reflect a backlash against feminism, they’re part of the much larger story of men’s long, uneasy relationship with bourgeois order. The SYM with a taste for Maxim or South Park may not like Gloria Steinem, but neither does he care for anyone who tells him to behave—teachers, nutritionists, prohibitionists, vegetarians, librarians, church ladies, counselors, and moralists of all stripes. In fact, men have always sought out an antisocial, even anarchic, edge in their popular culture. In a renowned essay, the critic Barbara Ehrenreich argued that the arrival of Playboy in 1953 represented the beginning of a male rebellion against the conformity of mid-century family life and of middle-class virtues like duty and self-discipline. “All woman wants is security,” she quotes an early Playboy article complaining. “And she is perfectly willing to crush man’s adventurous freedom-loving spirit to get it.” Even the name of the magazine, Ehrenreich observed, “defied the convention of hard-won maturity.”

Ehrenreich was right about the seditious impulse behind Playboy, but wrong about its novelty. Male resistance to bourgeois domesticity had been going on since the bourgeoisie went domestic. In A Man’s Place, historian John Tosh locates the rebellion’s roots in the early nineteenth century, when middle-class expectations for men began to shift away from the patriarchal aloofness of the bad old days. Under the newer bourgeois regime, the home was to be a haven in a heartless world, in which affection and intimacy were guiding virtues. But in Tosh’s telling, it didn’t take long before men vented frustrations with bourgeois domestication: they went looking for excitement and male camaraderie in empire building, in adventure novels by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, and in going to “the club.”

By the early twentieth century, the emerging mass market in the U.S. offered new outlets for the virile urges that sat awkwardly in the bourgeois parlor; hence titles like Field and Stream and Man’s Adventure, as well as steamier fare like Escapade and Caper. When television sets came on the market in the late 1940s, it was the airing of heavyweight fights and football games that led Dad to make the big purchase; to this day, sports events—the battlefield made civilized—glue him to the Barcalounger when he should be folding the laundry.

But this history suggests an uncomfortable fact about the new SYM: he’s immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about whether “masculinity” is natural or constructed—whether men are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile. For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can—and will—try to stay a child-man. Yesterday’s paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures at sea, pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

And that heaven can get pretty piggish. Take Tucker Max, whose eponymous website is a great favorite among his peers. In a previous age, Max would have been what was known as a “catch.” Good-looking, ambitious, he graduated from the University of Chicago and Duke Law. But in a universe where child-men can thrive, he has found it more to his liking—and remarkably easy—to pursue a different career path: professional “asshole.” Max writes what he claims are “true stories about my nights out acting like an average twentysomething”—binge drinking (UrbanDictionary.com lists Tucker Max Drunk, or TMD, as a synonym for “falling down drunk”), fighting, leaving vomit and fecal detritus for others to clean up, and, above all, hooking up with “random” girls galore—sorority sisters, Vegas waitresses, Dallas lap dancers, and Junior Leaguers who’re into erotic asphyxiation.

Throughout his adventures, Max—like a toddler stuck somewhere around the oedipal stage—remains fixated on his penis and his “dumps.” He is utterly without conscience—“Female insecurity: it’s the gift that keeps on giving,” he writes about his efforts to undermine his prey’s self-esteem in order to seduce them more easily. Think of Max as the final spawn of an aging and chromosomally challenged Hugh Hefner, and his website and best-selling book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, as evidence of a male culture in profound decline. Playboy’s aspirations toward refinement still hinted at the call of the ego and a culture with limits on male restiveness; Max, the child-man who answers to no one except his fellow “assholes,” is all id—and proud of it.

Now, you could argue that the motley crew of Maxim, Comedy Central, Halo 3, and even the noxious Tucker Max aren’t much to worry about, and that extended adolescence is what the word implies: a temporary stage. Most guys have lots of other things going on, and even those who spend too much time on TuckerMax.com will eventually settle down. Men know the difference between entertainment and real life. At any rate, like gravity, growing up happens; nature has rules.

That’s certainly a hope driving the sharpest of recent child-man entertainments, Judd Apatow’s hit movie Knocked Up. What sets Knocked Up apart from, say, Old School, is that it invites the audience to enjoy the SYM’s immaturity—his T-and-A obsessions, his slobby indolence—even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded 23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do when she decides to have the baby, not because he’s a “badass”—actually, he has a big heart—but because he dwells among social retards. His roommates spend their time squabbling about who farted on whose pillow and when to launch their porn website. His father is useless, too: “I’ve been divorced three times,” he tells Ben when his son asks for advice about his predicament. “Why are you asking me?” In the end, though, Ben understands that he needs to grow up. He gets a job and an apartment, and learns to love Alison and the baby. This is a comedy, after all.

It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you. But the important question that Apatow’s comedy deals with only obliquely is what extended living as a child-man does to a guy—and to the women he collides with along the way.

For the problem with child-men is that they’re not very promising husbands and fathers. They suffer from a proverbial “fear of commitment,” another way of saying that they can’t stand to think of themselves as permanently attached to one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends; many are even willing to move in with them. But cohabiting can be just another Peter Pan delaying tactic. Women tend to see cohabiting as a potential path to marriage; men view it as another place to hang out or, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead observes in Why There Are No Good Men Left, a way to “get the benefits of a wife without shouldering the reciprocal obligations of a husband.”

Even men who do marry don’t easily overcome child-manhood. Neal Pollack speaks for some of them in his 2007 memoir Alternadad. Pollack struggles with how to stay “hip”—smoking pot and going to rock concerts—once he becomes a father to Elijah, “the new roommate,” as he calls him. Pollack makes peace with fatherhood because he finds that he can introduce his toddler to the best alternative bands, and also because he has so many opportunities to exercise the child-man’s fascination with “poop.” He is affectingly mad for his little boy. Yet his efforts to turn his son into a hip little Neal Pollack—“My son and I were moshing! Awesome!”—reflect the self-involvement of the child-man who resists others’ claims on him.

Knocked Up evokes a more destructive self-involvement in a subplot involving Alison’s miserably married sister Debbie and her husband, Pete, the father of her two little girls. Pete, who frequently disappears to play fantasy baseball, get high in Las Vegas, or just go to the movies on his own, chronically wields irony to distance himself from his family. “Care more!” his wife yells at him. “You’re cool because you don’t give a shit.”

And that “coolness” points to what may be the deepest existential problem with the child-man—a tendency to avoid not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick Hornby’s central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book’s antihero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father. Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to fill your days without actually doing anything. “Sixty years ago, all the things Will relied on to get him through the day simply didn’t exist,” Hornby writes. “There was no daytime TV, there were no videos, there were no glossy magazines. . . . Now, though, it was easy [to do nothing]. There was almost too much to do.”

Will’s unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness. To pick up women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just another form of entertainment, a “fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs, and a great night out, but nothing much more than that.”

As the title of his 2005 novel Indecision suggests, Benjamin Kunkel also shows how apathy infects the new SYM world. His hero, 28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, suffers from “abulia”—chronic indecisiveness—so severe that he finds himself paralyzed by the Thanksgiving choices of turkey, cranberry sauce, and dressing. His parents are divorced, his most recent girlfriend has faded away, and he has lost his job. Like Will, Dwight is a quintessential slacker, unable to commit and unwilling to feel. The only woman he has loved is his sister, who explains the attraction: “I’m the one girl you actually got to know in the right way. It was gradual, it was inevitable.” Like Hornby, Kunkel sees the easy availability of sex as a source of slacker apathy. In a world of serial relationships, SYMs “fail to sublimate their libidinal energies in the way that actually makes men attractive,” Kunkel told a dismayed female interviewer in Salon. With no one to challenge them to deeper connections, they swim across life’s surfaces.

The superficiality, indolence, and passionlessness evoked in Hornby’s and Kunkel’s novels haven’t triggered any kind of cultural transformation. Kunkel’s book briefly made a few regional bestseller lists, and Hornby sells well enough. But sales of “lad lit,” as some call books with SYM heroes, can’t hold a candle to those of its chick-lit counterpart. The SYM doesn’t read much, remember, and he certainly doesn’t read anything prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be into self-mockery; self-reflection is something else entirely.

That’s too bad. Men are “more unfinished as people,” Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book is Marriage and Caste in America.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Israel's prime minister has instructed his government to draw up plans for a "world wide campaign" to lobby for changes in the international laws of war.

The order from Binyamin Netanyahu follows a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss Israel's response to the UN's Goldstone report, which condemned Israel's actions during the 22-day war on Gaza earlier this year.

The meeting also called for the formation of a special committee to deal with the international legal consequences of the report and the prospect Israeli officials could face war crimes trials abroad.

The Israeli government contends international law needs to be amended in order to fight global terrorism.

"The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism," Netanyahu's office said in a statement following Tuesday's meeting.

It added that the cabinet had also instructed justice ministry officials to form a committee to deal with the prospect of "legal proceedings abroad against the state of Israel or its citizens".

"We need to keep punching a hole in this lie that is spreading with the help of the Goldstone report," Netanyahu was quoted as saying in the statement.

'Freedom of action'

The statement was backed by Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, who said a change in the international laws of war was "in the interest of anyone fighting terrorism".

He added that the government wanted to give the Israeli military "the full backing to have the freedom of action."

The UN-backed Goldstone report – compiled by South African jurist Richard Goldstone - accuses Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during last winter's war in Gaza, but is more critical of Israeli troops for "terrorising and targeting" civilians.

Goldstone recommended that the conclusions of the report be forwarded to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague if the two sides fail to conduct credible investigations into the conflict within six months.

On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) endorsed the report, but Netanyahu has promised that it will be vetoed at the UN General Assembly.

Israel has previously called the report unbalanced, while Netanyahu has promised a lengthy fight to "delegitimise" the findings by the UN commission.

An Israeli official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the issue of establishing an official inquiry into the conduct of the military during the Gaza campaign was not raised at Tuesday's meeting.

Goldstone attacked

Richard Goldstone himself has faced a storm of personal attacks inside Israel since the report's publication.

But on Monday he urged the Israeli government to comply with calls for a full investigation into the war, rejecting suggestions that the report risked sinking the stalled Middle East peace process.

"It's a shallow, utterly false allegation," Goldstone said during a meeting with a group of rabbis in the United States.

"What peace process are they talking about? There isn't one."

About 1,400 Palestinians – the majority of them civilians - and 13 Israelis were killed during Israel's three-week war on Gaza between December and January, which had the stated aim of stopping rocket attacks by Palestinian fighters from the coastal territory.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Ever wondered why most Muslim's abroad rarely complain about the Iraq war or mention the war crimes committed against Muslim's nor do they ever question/complain about their governments acts of terrorism committed in the ME ( at least not publicly ) ? They can only speak when it's carried out by Israel; but never when it is a Western State's terrorism. Well we Muslims know why; but here is further proof for everyone else :

The government programme aimed at preventing Muslims from being lured into violent extremism is being used to gather intelligence about innocent people who are not suspected of involvement in terrorism, the Guardian has learned.

The information the authorities are trying to find out includes political and religious views, information on mental health, sexual activity and associates, and other sensitive information, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Other documents reveal that the intelligence and information can be stored until the people concerned reach the age of 100.

Tonight Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, branded it the biggest spying programme in Britain in modern times and an affront to civil liberties.

The intelligence is being gathered as part of the strategy Preventing Violent Extremism – Prevent for short. It was launched three years ago to stop people being lured to al-Qaida ideology and committing acts of terrorism.

The government and police have repeatedly denied that the £140m programme is a cover for spying on Muslims in Britain. But sources directly involved in running Prevent schemes say it involves gathering intelligence about the thoughts and beliefs of Muslims who are not involved in criminal activity.

Instances around the country include:

• In the Midlands, funding for a mental health project to help Muslims was linked to information about individuals being passed to the authorities.

• In a college in northern England, a student who attended a meeting about Gaza was reported by one lecturer as a potential extremist. He was found not to be.

• A nine-year-old schoolboy in east London, who was referred to the authorities after allegedly showing signs of extremism – the youngest case known in Britain. He was "deprogrammed" according to a source with knowledge of the case.

• Within the last month, one new youth project in London alleged it was being pressured by the Metropolitan police to provide names and details of Muslim youngsters, as a condition of funding. None of the young Muslims have any known terrorist history.

• In one London borough, those working with youngsters were told to add information to databases they hold to highlight which youths were Muslim. They were also asked to provide information, to be shared with the police, about which streets and areas Muslim youngsters could be found on.

• In Birmingham the programme manager for Prevent is in fact a senior counter- terrorism police officer. Paul Marriott has been seconded to work in the equalities division of Britain's biggest council.

• In Blackburn, at least 80 people were reported to the authorities for showing signs of extremism. They were referred to the Channel project, part of Prevent.

• A youth project manager alleges his refusal to provide intelligence led to the police spreading false rumours and trying to smear him and his organisation.

• One manager of a project in London said : "I think part of the point of the [Prevent] programme is to spy and intelligence gather. I won't do that." In another London borough wardens on council estates were told to inform on people not whom they suspected of crimes, but whom they suspected could be susceptible to radicalisation. One source, who has been involved in Whitehall discussions on counter-terrorism, said: "There is no doubt Prevent is in part about gathering intelligence on people's thoughts and beliefs. No doubt." He added that the authorities feared "they'd be lynched" if they admitted Prevent included spying.

Ed Husain, of the Quilliam Foundation, who has advised both Labour and the Conservatives on extremism, said: "It is gathering intelligence on people not committing terrorist offences." Husain, whose group receives £700,000 in Prevent funding, believes it is morally right to give law enforcement agencies the best chance of stopping terrorists before they strike.

Serious concerns that the Prevent programme is being used at least in part to "spy" on Muslims have been voiced not just by Islamic groups, but youth workers, teachers and others. Some involved in the programme have told the Guardian of their fears that they are being co-opted into spying. They did not want to be named, fearing they would lose their job.

Some groups have refused its funding. In several areas the provision of funding is explicitly linked to agreeing to sharing of information, or intelligence, with agencies including law enforcement.

Traditionally in Britain intelligence is gathered by the police and security services. Prevent is trying to turn community, religious and voluntary groups into information or intelligence providers.

Prevent is run by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, part of the Home Office. It is widely regarded in Whitehall as being an intelligence agency.

The OSCT is headed up by Charles Farr, a former senior intelligence officer, with expertise in covert work. Also senior in the OSCT is another former senior intelligence officer. The Guardian has been asked not to name him for security reasons.

Chakrabarti said she was horrified by the revelations. "It is the biggest domestic spying programme targeting the thoughts and beliefs of the innocent in Britain in modern times," she said.

"It is information-gathering directed at the innocent and the spying is directed at people because of their religion, and not because of their behaviour."

The Home Office said: "Any suggestion that Prevent is about spying is simply wrong. Prevent is about working with communities to protect vulnerable individuals and address the root causes of radicalisation."

Yew, we still have places such as Iraq and Afghanistan that were subdued by military might, but he outrage of the world was heard, and these countries are being given back to the people that inhabit them.

Can you compare the two statements ? Somehow the Iraqi's are to forgive the Americans for the acts of terrorism committed against them. Be it the innocent people killed during the sanctions or those killed during the invasion and continued occupation ( when did they give it back ? ) or the people killed, while trying to overthrow Saddam, during the Iraq-Iran war as a result of Americans sharing intelligence with Saddam to keep him in power. They're also to forgive them for all the deaths that resulted from the - American Funded - coup that led to Saddam's uncle to come to power. But the American's don't forget their dead or forgive their killers !People speak of peace and forgiveness but nobody in the west has ever even sincerely apologized or admitted their acts of terrorism - a fascist doing it for oil doesn't count - . I mean who is to compensate the Iranian's for all the deaths that resulted from the overthrow of their democratically elected government ? and everything that followed it including the current regime. Why should they have to change to meet America's expectations of them when it was the US that messed everything up in the first place ? What makes America so right that it is allowed to overthrow, kill and provoke civil wars simply because its companies aren't getting first class treatment or that the governments in place don't suit them. I mean the fact that a dictator/war-criminal like Bush got elected twice should be enough for anyone with any two-cents of brain to stop swallowing this rubbish, or do they have their heads so high up their asses ( a phrase used to describe Libyans by an American nonetheless ) that that is too much to expect ? They think they have a democracy when after nearly a year of election debates and propaganda and millions of dollars wasted - when their economy is failing - they still have the same government in place doing the same thing, except with different faces. That's basically all democracy is; putting puppets to take the blame in front of the mass media while the real "rulers" are pulling the strings from behind the scenes and whenever people catch onto your puppet change him.I won't even get started on the Goldstone report and how the Americans because they support Israel said it was biased and then continued to pressure the PA traitors into stopping any criminal action against the Israeli's, who is going to avenge the dead in Gaza ? Come to think of it who is going to avenge all the dead who have been killed as a result of the installation of this foreign western outpost into our region ? Americans have been constantly overthrowing Middle-Eastern regimes to make sure that those in power aren't a threat to Israel at the expense of the average Middle-Easterner for at least 50 years now !Peace isn't just a word. When you take my land and throw me out on the street don't expect peace or negotiations before you give it back. It's not peaceful of me to live homeless on the street just so you can live "peacefully" in my house. When you kill my loved ones or inact a crime that results in their death, peace doesn't come by me forgetting them especially not when you don't stop killing more people.The funny thing is that even though a lot of people get angry at me for being provocative, especially the expat/green-zone kids crowd, and for bringing up anti-American articles that they think provoke hate and terrorism and stand in their way of promoting "peace" and "mutual understanding" the single greatest provoker of terrorism and hate is the US of A everytime it does something stupid ( which seems to be the only thing it knows how to do ) in the ME it provokes more hate. I remember before 9/11 people were angry at our governments and blaming them for everything and when you invoke an example of Western interference you would be silenced by "conspiracy theory" or "it's history" or something along that line as if there are two sides to the story; but the West continues to remind its victims of its past atrocities by repeating them over and over again they're worst than Al-Qaeda - which is probably why they've taken a back row seat lately .Bottom line to those who speak of peace, stop invading us and killing us and sticking your noses in our business through your NGO's and stop empowering minorities that represent less than .0001% of our population as if they speak for us, when they are nothing more than your lackeys then we can talk about peace ..................... after all there's no peace without justice !

Just found this site that ranks mobile phones based on the radiation they emit, while most service providers try to dispel the notion that the radiation emitted from mobile phones can be harmful on the basis that statistics alone can't prove it. It's an argument similar to the anti-cancer material argument.

I've post a list of the most common mobiles below and you can find the radiation levels of all the old mobiles here.So where does your phone rank ?